Net Neutrality is dead. An unstable equilibrium that’s persisted as the default since the 90s, wherein ISPs and telcoms route all ip packets the same without regard for content, origination or destination, the potential for censorship and chilling effects in the current oligarchical environment is a serious concern. However anarchists have long seen this day…

C4SS Media presents Jonathan Carp‘s “Fernando Teson Doesn’t Learn” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Of course, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine do not have the option of staying uninvolved. The wolf is at their door, it seems. While we of course wish them well, a sober analysis of the military situation does…

C4SS Media presents Kevin Carson‘s “With ‘Socialists’ Like Lawrence and Wishart, Who Needs Capitalists?” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. For the forces of information freedom, and other movements associated with the successor economy, to attempt to fight the established interests of the existing system for control of the state, is like an army…

A considerable portion of the Left has been diverted lately by a dispute between Lawrence & Wishart (the Marxist publishing house that owns the copyright to the multi-volume Collected Works of Marx and Engels in English) and the Marxist Internet Archive over the latter’s online digital version of the Collected Works. In surveying this dust-up,…

Over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Fernando Teson is once again pounding the drums for … something. Presumably after being so hilariously, catastrophically, historically, possibly even supernaturally wrong on Iraq, Teson has decided not to overtly pound the drums of war. He’s just vaguely calling for “moral clarity” now, which is progress for Teson. After all,…

In the latest example of a phenomenon as old as the state itself, Stan McCoy – formerly the US Trade Representative’s chief “intellectual property” negotiator, who wrote ACTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s IP chapter – was just given a cushy job at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). He’s one of over a dozen…

*Not really. I was surprised to open up the Columbia Journalism Review’s website last week and see this article by Steven Brill peering up at me: “Stories I’d Like To See: A fair view of the Koch brothers, and explaining bitcoin.” This section in particular cracked me up: This article in the Washington Post last…

One of the bigger media stories coming into 2014 is over whether Patch, AOL’s so-called hyperlocal news organization, will survive or bite the dust. While rumors of the controversial network’s demise were greatly exaggerated, it does appear that the future of the service is in flux – and what that means for hyperlocal. For y’all…

“Building Creative Commons: The Five Pillars of Open Source Finance” was written by Brett Scott and published on his blog The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. We are honored to have Brett Scott‘s permission to feature his article on C4SS. Feel free to connect with Scott through twitter: @Suitpossum. AHOY, THERE BE A CLOSED…

Rightists like David Brooks and former UN ambassador John Bolton, are, predictably, going ballistic over Edward Snowden — not only over his leaks, but over everything he represents to the society they identify with. By unilaterally deciding to leak documents, Brooks writes (“The Solitary Leaker,” NYT, June 10), Snowden has betrayed the “respect for institutions…

On September 4th, my op-ed Chelsea Manning and the State’s Abusive Transphobia was published as a letter to the editor in Urban Tulsa Weekly. The paper treated it as a “really convoluted counterpoint” to an asinine letter by Oklahoma State Senator Frank Simpson, who argued that Chelsea Manning was not a hero. State Senator Simpson…

Even as the U.S. security state becomes more closed, centralized and brittle in the face of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks, civil society and the public are responding to the post-Snowden repression by becoming more dispersed and resilient. That’s how networks always respond to censorship and surveillance. Each new attempt at a file-sharing service, after…

Back in 2006 Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, in The Starfish and the Spider, contrasted the way networks and hierarchies respond to outside attacks. Networks, when attacked, become even more decentralized and resilient. A good example is Napster and its successors, each of which has more closely approached an ideal peer-to-peer model, and further freed…

There’s nothing quite so funny as the sight of the authoritarian functionaries of a dying order trying to suppress a revolution they don’t understand — and failing miserably. The State Department’s attempt to censor 3-D printable gun files from DEFCAD is the latest — and one of the most gut-bustingly hilarious — attempts by the…

M. George van der Meer: We are now approaching a breaking point, a culmination of long-unfolding trends that will witness the old forces of rigid hierarchy and centrality collide with the dynamism of the networked, freed market.